Successful non-traditional dissertations include a comic book (Nick Sousanis), a hip-hop album (A.D. Carson), code and design without written chapters (me), and the use of digital formats and methods such as a Tumblog counter-narrative (Jade E. Davis) or topic modeling (Lisa Rhody).

Are you curious about using digital methods or forms to pursue your dissertation research questions? Or maybe dissertational gate-tenders (advisors, mentors, departments) have you seeking successful examples of DH as part of the dissertation. Wherever you’re coming from, here’s a short selection of readings to get you started exploring digital humanities as doctoral scholarship:

DH discussions under the aegis of scholarly organizations like MLA or AHA spend a good portion of time on concerns around evaluation and promotion relevant to the dissertation process. Resources you might check out on Humanities Commons include the Digital Humanists Group and events like the Online Forum on DH and Medicine recently posted on the Medical Humanities site.

#RemixtheDiss Models (hosted by the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center CUNY and HASTAC) A collaboratively built GoogleDoc with information on a variety of dissertations using new formats and methods, including digital humanities approaches. Info includes each dissertation’s university and department, tools and media used, status of the dissertation (possibly outdated), and contact addresses for getting on touch with these dissertators.

HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) A good community to read what other students in similar fields and stages of the degree to yours are thinking about, and for becoming comfortable with scholarly blogging. See especially those posts tagged as digital humanities or digital dissertations.

Some of the materials I created before or during my completed DH dissertation might also be relevant:

My PhD Exams reading list, including an introductory argument for the items on the list and two sets of materials: broad digital humanities readings, and textual scholarship with a focus on digital scholarly editing. Among other benefits, making DH a focus of your exams reading can help you understand your exam committee’s (as a potential dissertation committee) attitudes toward DH. A Zotero library of some of the list’s readings is here.

literalness makes it the closest form of reading imaginable. What distant reading lacks is distance. That distance is critical; it is the space between the literal text and the virtual text, between the inscriptional, notational surface and the rhetorical, cognitive effect that produces a text. (633)

In other words, when an algorithm “reads” a corpus by scouring it for patterns of one kind or another, it doesn’t transform the text the way that a human reader does. It can get so “close” because it reads without the powerful and dynamic cognitive filters through which human readers conjure, out of the written word, literary worlds. For Drucker, closing the gap between “reader” and text in this way is one of the things that makes distant reading “the closest form of reading imaginable.”

But, crucially, human decisions shape how a program closes that gap in the first place. As Drucker argues elsewhere in the article, “modeling and paramaterization”—decisions made by scholars and programmers as to what a program will look for and, therefore, be able to find—not only “shape the terms by which a text is analyzed to produce quantitative data,” but are also “rendered almost invisible by the forms in which results are expressed” (632). These before-the-fact decisions, then, are what allow an algorithm to read from such a close range—ignoring the “rhetorical, cognitive effect that produces a text,” they engage with “the inscriptional, notational surface” according to a set of pre-established instructions to produce results of one form or another. In this sense, some might argue that the “distance” distant reading “lacks” is the gap in which literature happens: the unpredictable, unwieldy interpretive space in which a reader transforms text on a page or screen into a living work of art.

Transcription

As I assemble my corpus of poetry from the Black Arts Movement, I’ve grown more interested in this gap between “inscriptional, notational surface” and “rhetorical, cognitive effect.” In the past three weeks I have transcribed approximately twenty books of poetry. This is, in many ways, the kind of “reading” that we expect a machine to be good at: tedious and time-consuming, sure, but also mechanical, even mindless—something lacking that human “distance” Drucker describes above.

When it comes to transcription, however, the devil is in the details. And anyone familiar with using OCR software to transcribe text from images knows that machines still struggle to get all the details right. After scanning pages into images and processing them with a program like ABBYY FineReader, the resulting text files are often garbled with mistakes—errors that require a human reviewer to identify, compare with the original, and correct by hand. Though an extremely useful piece of software, a program can’t be all things to all people, and I found this especially true for experimental texts like the poetry in my corpus that employ unusual indentation, spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and non-traditional spellings.

But I already knew that ABBYY FineReader would have trouble transcribing text from images from my corpus. That’s one of the reasons I decided to transcribe them by hand in the first place. What I didn’t anticipate was how much trouble I—a presumably well-trained human reader—would have transcribing text from physical documents into a text editor. This being the case even when my documents were fully intact and the text completely legible.

Over the course of the past few weeks, I found that this hairs-breadth, closest-form-of-reading-imaginable reading—the kind that seems to go no further than inscriptional surface—is also a complex task requiring creativity, imagination, and resourcefulness. Moreover, rather than being a mindless or merely mechanical task, the transcription of these texts frequently presented thorny decisions that demanded my judgement as a reader, scholar, and programmer. Arriving at these decisions often required not only a knowledge of digital methods, but also of bibliographical methods, questions of poetic form, and more practical project management skills.

Spacing

Take, for example, lines from “a/coltrane/poem,” the final poem from Sonia Sanchez’s 1970 collection We A BaddDDD People (and a poem that got me listening to Coltrane’s music while transcribing):

Like many of the poems from We A BaddDDD People, “a/coltrane/poem” makes dramatic use of indentation, punctuation, the spaces between words, and the spaces between lines. Even transcribing these lines to be published here on the Scholars’ Lab WordPress site, however, raises a number of technical and practical issues. For example, there is no easy way to produce this kind of whitespace in HTML. When web browsers parse the whitespace in poetry—indentation, tabs, etc.—they more or less get rid of it. While investigating the poetry of Mina Loy, Andrew Pilsch argues in his chapter in Reading Modernism with Machines that “the nature of HTML resists—even prevents—the easy introduction of … typographic experimentation” (245)—something he discusses earlier on his blog. Like Pilsch, I ended up having to make use of the “&nbsp” space—something Pilsch discusses more in-depth—to shoehorn spaces into the poem so it would appear correctly, I hope, in web browsers. This means that, in HTML, the above section of poetry looks like this:

In other words, a complete mess. But before trying to print parts of this poem in HTML through WordPress, at an even more basic level I had to get it into a text editor, a process which also raised a number of questions requiring practical decisions. As I type out the above lines into Atom, I have to ask: how many spaces should separate the words that seem to be a stage direction on the left— “(soft / … / chant)”—from the words on the right?

In an ideal world, I would have access to all materials used by Dudley Randall’sBroadside Press to publish this 1970 edition, as well as publication materials from all subsequent editions. Comparing these various documents, I would be able to get a better sense of the typographical materials and units of measurement used to represent Sanchez’s poem on paper. This would provide me with a more holistic sense of how to represent Sanchez’s poem in my text editor. However, given constraints on my time and resources as a Ph.D. student, as well as the size of my corpus, deciding how deep I want to dig in the archive to answer such questions requires serious consideration. Moreover, as far as I can tell, while there were printings of this edition of We A BaddDDD People as late as 1973, there were no other new editions of the work—so the edition I have is the only one I have to work with.

So when faced with the question—how many spaces should separate these words in a text file?—I looked at how far a space gets me in relation to other characters, gauged this against the kinds of spaces in poems elsewhere in the book, and made an educated guess: three after “(soft”, and one after “chant)”. The same goes for the space between “& BE.”, which is slightly larger than the gaps separating most other words. I’m not sure exactly how much larger this gap is, so I make another educated guess, giving it two spaces instead of one.

In a multiple-page poem defined by such visual experimentation, however, trying to measure and align every word, space, and line break so that the text in my text editor resembles the text on the page—even roughly—is a real challenge. In some cases, given the functionalities of the editor I’m working with, this challenge becomes an impasse. Even in the example above: the space separating the line “yeh. john coltrane.” from the preceding line—“BE-E-E-E-E-E-”—matches the size of other line breaks within stanzas in this volume. But the space separating this line from its succeeding line—“my favorite things is u.”—is both larger than line breaks within stanzas and smaller than breaks indicating new stanzas. While transcribing, I normally represent adjacent lines in a poem with adjacent lines in my text editor; I represent stanza breaks with an empty line. How do I represent in my text editor a line break that is effectively 1.5 times the size of a normal line break? Without reworking my entire spacing system across all of my poems, I can’t—so I decided to transcribe them as adjacent lines despite the clearly visible difference on the page.

Textual Scholarship

The nature of these challenges would come as no surprise to scholars—like Drucker—interested in textual study, bibliographical study, and scholarly editing. Having had the great fortune of taking a seminar here at UVA on textual criticism and scholarly editing with David Vander Meulen, a course at the Rare Book School on the book in the American industrial era with Michael Winship, as well as many thoughtful conversations with friend, colleague, and textual scholar James Ascher, I’ve had the opportunity to adopt many of these methodological lenses as my own. These lenses help us to ask questions like: what exactly, is a literary work? Is Sanchez’s We A BaddDDD People the words printed in ink on the pages of the physical book I’m holding? If there are discrepancies between this book and later editions, how do we reconcile them? And, more relevant to my current project, how does the digital copy of this work in my text editor differ from the bound copy held at UVA’s library from which I’m making my transcription?

In considering these questions, I find helpful the vocabulary used by textual scholar G.T. Tanselle that distinguishes between document, text, and work. To offer a greatly reduced shorthand for Tanselle’s nuanced thinking on these distinctions: there are texts of works and there are texts of documents. Texts of documents refer to the words, markings, or inscriptions on a physical object that is completely unique though it may seem to be identical to other artifacts. Texts of works, on the other hand, are slightly more complicated—they consider the words as instructions for performing that intangible thing that is a verbal literary work in the minds of readers.

Though they may seem abstract, conceptual distinctions such as these have emerged from some of the most concrete, hands-on, rubber-meets-the-road scholarship in literary thought—for example, the kind of thinking that goes into examining multiple versions of a work (like King Lear) so as to produce a single scholarly edition. A distinction like Tanselle’s between texts of documents and texts of works offers a guiding light for scholar down in the often bewildering weeds of a given archive. As Tanselle argues in “Textual Criticism and Deconstruction,”

The distinction between the texts of documents (handwritten or printed, private or published) and the texts of works is basic to textual criticism. The effort to “reconstruct” or “establish” the texts of works presupposes that the texts we find in documents cannot automatically be equated with the texts of the works that those documents claim to be conveying. (1)

In other words, scholars must exercise a great deal of judgement as they try to reconcile meaningful—and sometimes extremely significant—discrepancies between versions of a given physical text as found in physical documents in their efforts to determine the text of the work itself. The role that “intentions” play in all this— as in the words that were meant to be put down—and how best to account for the mediating forces and actors at work in the publication of a book, is a point of debate in textual scholarship, often dependent on the kinds of research questions one hopes to investigate (for more reading here, see D F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, Jerome McGann’s The Textual Condition, and Tanselle’s “Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology”). And as many scholars have argued, these conceptual distinctions central to textual criticism and thought extend to digital artifacts as well—see, for example, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “.txtual condition.” Scholarship such as this helps me to think through how a hand-typed .txt file of We A BaddDDD People relates to a physical codex made of paper and ink.

Stanza Breaks

Again, part of the purpose of this post is to expand on just how complicated transcription can be when it comes to performing text analysis on a literary corpus. Moreover, I’m hoping to think through how these practices are bound up with traditional bibliographical lines of inquiry. In short, I’m hoping here to offer further examples of how reading a literary text at extremely close range—Drucker’s “inscriptional, notational surface”—involves all kinds of human thought and judgement. Even if this thought and judgement are hidden in things we might take for granted—like the distinction between thinking of the book I’m holding as being Sonia Sanchez’s We A BaddDDD People, as opposed to a unique physical document inscribed with a text that intends to convey We A BaddDDD People.

So I want to offer a couple more examples of typographical concerns that came up during my transcription process. Unlike extra spaces between words in a line, these issues also more directly impact the kinds of results my analysis aims to produce, as they impact what “counts” as a line or stanza in my model.

The first has to do with stanza breaks. In my day-to-day reading practice, identifying a stanza break usually feels straightforward: lines grouped together in a poem, probably separated by white space. Digging a little deeper, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics begins its entry by defining a stanza as “a unit of poetic lines organized by a specific principle or set of principles” (1358). Likewise, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a stanza first and foremost as

A group of verse lines forming a section of a poem and sharing the same structure as all or some of the other sections of the same poem, in terms of the lengths of its lines, its metre, and usually its rhyme scheme. In printed poems, stanzas are separated by spaces.

While this definition doesn’t help us much with something like Sanchez’s “a/coltrane/poem”—a poem that more or less flies in the face of traditional stanzaic form—it does seem like it would help us if we wanted to make a “stanza” a parameter in our analytical models, or even in figuring out how best to separate lines and stanzas in our text files.

But even in more traditionally stanzaic poems—of which there are many in my corpus—deciding what “counts” as a stanza can get messy. Something as simple as page breaks, for instance, can wreak havoc in making such decisions. This is particularly the case when only one edition of a work exists, and one doesn’t have access to original manuscripts.

Consider, for example, a poem titled “Malcolm Spoke/ who listened?” from Haki R. Madhubuti’s 1969 collection Don’t Cry, Scream, published with Broadside Press. The poem is stanzaic, and distinguishes stanzas with what seem to me like normal breaks. These groupings, however, have no regular rhyme scheme, no regular use of capitalization, no regular number of lines, no tight thematic or narrative structure (i.e. a point of view that alternates from stanza to stanza), and no regular pattern in punctuation (i.e. some stanzas conclude with no punctuation while some conclude with a period). And, crucially, the poem extends partway onto a second page. These are the two groups of lines on either side of the page break:

animals come in all colors.
dark meat will roast as fast as whi-te meat
[PAGE BREAK]
especially in
the unitedstatesofamerica’s
new
self-cleaning ovens.

For a few reasons, I decided to transcribe these two sections as a single stanza. First, at a more visual, design level, the poem has no other stanzas as short as two lines. The book as a whole, in fact, has very few two-line stanzas, and while there are a few single unattached lines, they usually come right at the end of a poem. In comparison with the rest of the poem and the other poems in the collection, then, it seemed more likely to be a larger stanza than not.

More convincingly, however, my feeling that these two chunks are one unit comes from the poem itself—the group of lines above seems, to me, to develop a coherent line of poetic thought. The first two lines introduce the metaphor of meat of “all colors” roasting, and the following line (after the page break) intensifies this imagery by locating this metaphor in the United States and its “new /self-cleaning ovens.” The lines after the page break make most grammatical and metaphorical sense when taken as part and parcel of the lines prior to the page break.

This is not to say that other poems in this volume don’t break up grammatical expressions across stanzas—they definitely do. Other poems in this volume also develop specific metaphors or images over the course of several stanzas. But with this poem in particular, stanzas seem to be doing something else. Each has a kind of conceptual focus—they stand alongside one another as evenly-weighted, coherent units of expression. For example, the stanza preceding the one quoted above is as follows:

the double-breasted hipster
has been replaced with a
dashiki wearing rip-off
who went to city college
majoring in physical education.

This stanza develops, from line to line, a description of—and stance towards—this “dashiki wearing rip-off” who replaces the “double-breasted hipster.” Each line builds on the last, slowly unfolding different aspects of how one figure “has been replaced” with another: the speaker discloses a skeptical attitude towards these figures, identified by what they wear, where they went to school, and what they studied. Like the stanza with the page break, this group of lines seems to me to develop a coherent line of thought that doesn’t spill over into subsequent stanzas.

Understanding these stanzas in light of the poem as a whole, then, aligns with this reading: the rhythm of the poem as it moves from stanza to stanza seems to emerge from a feeling of moving from one idea to the next—and, for me as a reader, breaking this group of lines at the page break into two different stanzas feels like it disrupts that rhythm.

It could certainly be argued that the group of lines with the page break was meant to be two stanzas specifically so as to disrupt the rhythm of this stanzaic form—that such a disruption is vital to the poem’s meaning. But, as is the case with scholarly editing, I had to make a judgement call to proceed with my project. So I considered everything I knew, tried to find out more if possible, and made the best decision I could given what I had in front of me.

Runovers

One last example. Lines of poetry can get very long. Sometimes, lines get too long for the physical documents on which they’re inscribed. During an enlightening conversation with Jahan Ramazani on this and many other issues addressed in this post, he gave me the example of editing The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and having to print and number the extremely long lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Central to this decision-making process was considering standard practice on what the Chicago Manual of Style calls “Long lines and runovers in poetry.”

The CMS defines runovers as “the remainder of lines too long to appear as a single line,” which are “usually indented one em from the line above.” In other words, when lines get too long—as in Ginsberg’s poetry, or Walt Whitman’s—a hanging indent about an em-dash in length tells the reader that the line was too long for the book. The entry concludes, however, by indicating that it might not always be so clear when an indentation is a runover and when it’s a new line:

Runover lines, although indented, should be distinct from new lines deliberately indented by the poet … Generally, a unique and uniform indent for runovers will be enough to accomplish this.

As we’ve seen already just in this post, much of poetry in my corpus rebels against traditional poetic form, including standard indentation and spacing practices. Determining whether or not a group of words is one or two lines, however, is extremely important for my project. The “line” is the basic unit I’ve been asking sentiment analysis tools in TextBlob and NLTK to evaluate for sentiment. In short: what counts as a line really matters, and ambiguities surrounding runovers could very well add up to have a significant impact on the results of my analyses.

An excellent example of this appears a few pages earlier in Madhubuti’s Don’t Cry, Scream, in a poem titled “Gwendolyn Brooks.” The poem is available online through the Poetry Foundation, and it appears in my physical copy as it does on this website, indentations and all. Halfway through the poem there is a distinct sequence, over a dozen lines long, that lists a series of portmanteaus describing different kinds of “black”—from “360degreesblack” to “blackisbeautifulblack” and “i justdiscoveredblack.” Over the course of this sequence, there are three indented lines, each one-word long, that interrupt the otherwise steady stream of images.

At first bluff, these lines struck me as runovers. The list-like nature of the lines felt like they lent themselves to running a little long—as we see with a poet like Whitman, once a list starts, it can just keep going and going. Moreover, no thematic or poetic reason jumped out at me as to why someone might indent these words as opposed to any others. Of course, there is the possibility that such indentations were completely on purpose, and are part of a project to disrupt and transform any resonance with someone like Whitman and the canon he represents. Sitting in front of my computer, a little bleary-eyed from all the transcribing, I honestly wasn’t sure.

So I began looking for other appearances of the poem. The version published by the Poetry Foundation complicated my initial thought that these one-word indented lines were runovers. Jahan Ramazani also suggested that, given the importance of anthologies to the Black Arts Movement, even if a book has no later editions, individual poems therein might appear somewhere in a collection.

Such a realization, however, presents another fork in the road of my research. As a researcher committed to being as thoughtful and thorough as possible as I work with the poetry from a revolutionary art movement, I am delighted to know that I still might be able to pursue questions that I thought would remain unanswered (i.e., “is this a runover line or two separate lines?”). As a researcher with limited resources, however, I have to decide whether or not pursuing these questions will be the best use of my time and energy in this particular project. There are a lot of anthologies containing poetry from the Black Arts Movement out there, so I have to weigh the time it would take to locate and look through them all for instances of those poems from my ~20 book corpus that may have runover lines, against the potential impact it would have on the results of the analyses I hope to perform. As it currently stands, I’ve made a note of this particular ambiguity and plan to reassess what I should do with it and others like it after assembling the rest of the corpus.

Final Thoughts

As this post has hopefully shown, transcribing texts from book to screen can get very tricky. More than a simple act of mechanical reproduction, it can stump us with questions about literary works that seem to have no discernible answers. From one moment to the next, it can demand a working knowledge of bibliographical methods; digital methods; aesthetic form; and how to manage a project’s resources. And—as Drucker above argues regarding text analysis more generally—navigating these questions requires rigorous human judgement every step of the way. Even in situations where the practicalities of project management and the realities of our textual archive make this judgement feel all-too-fallible.

There are other, important aspects of this human judgement which I haven’t had time to think through as much as I would like to have in this post. For example, digging deeper into those questions explored by Andrew Pilsch mentioned above that investigate the challenging ways in which web browsers are designed to parse the whitespace in poetry in HTML. Or, how the default parameters of the basic tokenizing packages in NLTK throw away whitespace—the idea that the programmers behind these text analysis technologies view their standard use as most likely to focus on text, not the spaces between text.

Very long story short: transcription is complicated! And I hope this post has done something to foreground some of those invisible, behind-the-scenes decisions that—like modeling and parameterization—give shape to the results a text analysis project produces.

]]>3Lauren Reynoldshttp://scholarslab.org/?p=141492018-02-07T18:02:51Z2018-02-07T17:51:48ZContinue reading “All About the Archive: Guest Teaching at Washington and Lee”.]]>In this post Lauren Reynolds, a former PhD student in Spanish and Makerspace Technologist, describes her work with Professor Andrea LePage’s course at Washington & Lee. This work is supported by an ASC grant expanding collaboration between Washington & Lee and the Scholars’ Lab and supplemented by W&L’s Mellon-funded grant to support digital humanities in the classroom. Read more about the collaboration. Cross-posted to the WLUDH blog.

I was invited to guest lecture for Professor Andrea LePage’s undergraduate course, Contemporary Latinx and Chicanx Art. After discussing possible topics for the workshop, Professor LePage and I decided on the topic of “Archive as Protest.” This topic overlapped with my research on cultural memory in US Latinx texts and presented me with the opportunity to learn more about digital archives. As I developed the plan for the workshop, I organized the lesson around questions surrounding digital archives, preserving cultural memory, and cataloguing a variety of experiences.

These are very broad questions, so I outlined two goals for the class: First, I wanted the students to begin to think about information storage in the broadest sense. Then we would narrow down the idea of seemingly endless information to a conversation about cataloguing and metadata. Second, I aimed for our discussion of cultural creation and preservation to help the students understand one way in which preserving information through archives can have a positive social impact.

After introductions, we began the lecture with a brief discussion of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story La biblioteca de babel. This text gave me the opportunity to sneak a bit of Latin American literature into the course and provided an entry point for talking about information storage. So, we began with questions about Borges’ conception of an infinite library: Why do you think some people say that Borges “discovered” the internet decades before it was invented? What similarities do you see between the infinite library and the internet? What are some differences? How is a library organized? Is the internet organized? What possibilities/challenges do a universe of information pose?

Next, we zoomed in to a more focused discussion of archives, their purposes, and how the internet has changed the preservation and accessibility of information. We talked about documenting history from many perspectives and, in small groups, the students reflected on the following quote from Daniel Mutibwa:

“The overarching argument is that local, alternative, bottom-up approaches to telling (hi)stories and re-enacting the past not only effectively take on a socio-political dimension directed at challenging dominant, hegemonic, institutional narratives and versions of the past, but – in doing so – they also offer new and refreshingly different ways of understanding, representing, remembering, and rediscovering the past meaningfully in ways that local communities and regions can relate with.”[1]

The students began to connect this quote to their own interests as we discussed the possibilities of digital archives. We specifically looked at the Hurricane Katrina collection to talk about the pros and cons of bottom-up archives: http://hurricanearchive.org/collections

We noted how such archives allow for individual stories to be shared and how they can become part of a community’s healing process after a tragedy.

This digital archive also prompted interest in logistical questions, such how stories are collected, saved, and mapped in the creation of an online archive. Specifically, the students were asked to think about:

Development: How to choose what to include, authenticity

Retrieval and Collection

Reaching the Community: Supporting Research, Learning, and Teaching

Reference Information and Providing Access

Our last activity presented the opportunity to learn about different types of metadata and its role in cataloguing. We discussed social media presences as types of personal, living archives and how hashtags such as #TBT, #breakfast, and #gooddog can be seen as a means of organizing Instagram posts. In pairs, the students were then given three photos of different US Latinx artworks and asked to assign categories to each photo. They thought about specificity and accessibility: how to make the photos both accessible in broad searches, but easily found for specific inquiries. Each pair shared their selected words with a another group. After comparing their different hashtags and debating which labels were the most useful, each group came up with a definitive set of categories. We then talked about the different “data sets” created in class, noting the benefits and possible drawbacks of each one.

The class concluded with small group discussions of overarching questions:

Difficulties posed by the fact that technology is always changing

How to establish trust between archive curators and communities

Library neutrality, the library’s role in community engagement, and the line between memorial and protest

Advantages and disadvantages of allowing anonymous submissions

Oral Histories: Who determines what questions are asked? How are these interviews and all texts edited and by who? Can “alternative” truths be abused to represent dangerous falsehoods?

How do we preserve horrific histories? Do we reproduce offensive terms?

With the time remaining, the students talked about whichever question interested them most in their work and, more broadly, in their lives.

]]>0Chris Gisthttp://scholarslab.org/?p=140852018-01-12T15:16:36Z2018-01-12T14:52:37ZContinue reading “Spring 2018 UVa Library GIS Workshop Series”.]]>All sessions are one hour and assume participants have no previous experience using GIS. Sessions will be hands-on with step-by-step tutorials and expert assistance. All sessions will be held on Tuesdays from 10AM to 11AM in the Alderman Electronic Classroom, ALD 421 (adjacent to the Scholars’ Lab) and are free and open to the UVa and larger Charlottesville community. No registration, just show up!

February 6thMaking Your First Map with ArcGISHere’s your chance to get started with geographic information systems software in a friendly, jargon-free environment. This workshop introduces the skills you need to make your own maps. Along the way you’ll get a taste of Earth’s most popular GIS software (ArcGIS) and a gentle introduction to cartography. You’ll leave with your own cartographic masterpieces and tips for learning more in your pursuit of mappiness at UVa.

February 13thArcGIS Online: IntroductionWith ArcGIS Online, you can use and create maps and scenes, access ready-to-use maps, layers and analytics, publish data as web layers, collaborate and share, access maps from any device, make maps with your Microsoft Excel data, and customize the ArcGIS Online website.

February 20thArcGIS Online: Spatial AnalysisArcGIS Online now has spatial analysis tools that can be easier to use than similar desktop GIS tools. Come learn how to use the simple yet powerful analysis tools available through ArcGIS Online.

February 27thArcGIS Online: Story MapsStory Maps are templates that allow authors to give context to their ArcGIS Online maps. Whether telling a story, giving a tour or comparing historic maps, Esri Story Maps are easy-to-use applications that create polished presentations.

March 13thArcGIS Online: Data CollectionWhether you are crowd sourcing spatial data or performing survey work, having applications that automatically record location and upload data directly to a mapping application is incredibly useful.

March 20thWhat’s New with ArcGIS ProThe handwriting is on the wall. ArcGIS Pro will be replacing ArcMap as the desktop GIS in the near future. Come learn about the changes and quirks of ArcGIS Pro from an ArcMap user prospective.

March 27thIntroduction to QGISArcGIS isn’t the only game in town. The best and most popular open source GIS application is QGIS. It runs on most platforms and does some things better than ArcGIS. Come learn more about another tool in the GIS toolbox.

]]>0Brandon Walshhttp://walshbr.comhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=140532017-12-14T14:42:42Z2017-12-14T14:42:42ZContinue reading “Fellowship Calls and Grad Student Professional Development”.]]>I want to share several developments from the grad programs side of the Lab this semester. It’s been a busy fall, and I’m pleased with all the work the team has put into our programs!

For one, the CFPs for two of our fellowship programs are now live. The Praxis Program, which will welcome its eighth cohort next year, will have a deadline of February 15th for applications from PhD students at UVA. This flagship program is in many ways the core of our graduate community, and we’re very excited that it continues to thrive. I am also very pleased to announce that the Digital Humanities Prototyping fellowships, piloted this past year with a cohort of four students, will continue next year with its own application deadline of February 15th. Open to PhD *and* MA students at UVA, these fellowships are meant to shore up our support of students in the intermediate years of their graduate work, to provide collaborative projects a space in our fellowship portfolio, and to give young scholars a chance to craft a spark that might catch further down the line with applications for further funding here or elsewhere. Please tell your students and colleagues! I always strongly encourage students to get in touch with me if they are planning to apply – that way they will be on our radar for other opportunities down the line regardless of how this particular application shakes out. Along with our newly restructured DH Fellows program, these three fellowship programs provide support and experience for more stages of the graduate student timeline than was previously possible.

In addition to the fellowship announcements, I also wanted to draw attention to a revamping of what was formerly known as the “graduate fellowships” page. Our programs have grown a lot since this page was last revised, and the new “graduate fellowships and opportunities” page now better represents the wealth of offerings in the Scholars’ Lab. This new, catch-all page offers a space where students can see all of our opportunities beyond our annual fellowship programs. We regularly employ graduate students as Makerspace Technologists to assist in 3D printing and experimental computing in our makerspace (and we just released a call with multiple openings for spring 2018!). Cultural Heritage Informatics Interns each semester work with Will and Arin to 3D scan, process, and print artifacts all while getting course credit. Chris and Drew regularly work with student GIS Technicians who assist in the uploading of GIS datasets and creating applications on our GIS portal, all while getting valuable experience in spatial humanities. And, finally, a Mellon-funded collaboration with Washington and Lee University allows us to send students to their campus to give workshops on digital humanities to undergraduate courses. The amount of experience required for all these opportunities is quite variable, so be sure to read closely – in many cases we are more than happy to have you learn on the job. We’ve been doing all these things for quite a while, but hopefully now students can find easier access to information about our programs and how to get involved.

Finally, I’m especially pleased to share that we have a new section in this page on professional development for graduate students. The Scholars’ Lab programs give students valuable experiences and training, but we’ve also historically gone further than these official offerings. As UVA students apply to alt-ac and DH careers, we regularly give advice on the whole process, from finding a job to producing materials to interviewing. These offerings have long been ad hoc and by request, but I worried over the last several months that some potential students might get left out of such arrangements. A student might not know, for example, that we’d be willing to mock interview them in the happy event that they’re invited to campus for that digital humanities developer position. Or a student putting together their first job talk for a post-doc in digital humanities might not realize that we’re happy to lend a friendly ear and also share our *own* job talks.

This section is not perfect, and it by no means represents the sum of what any program can do to support graduate students. If you see something missing, drop me a line to let me know. But hopefully the statement of services there will serve as nice counterpoint to the values that we lay out in our group charter; hopefully the page’s presence will help someone find their way to us who might not otherwise have done so. After all, tacit assumptions about how others perceive our services can lead to people falling through the cracks, feeling like they’re going through a job search alone. Best that we be explicit, and best that we match our values with public statements of what we will do to back them up.

So in short – we’re here for you. If you’re part of the UVA community and looking for help with your DH or alt-ac job search, swing on by and let me know how we can help!

]]>Laura Millerhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=140642017-12-13T22:29:28Z2017-12-13T22:29:28ZContinue reading “Call for Spring 2018 Makerspace Technologist Applications”.]]>Are you a UVA graduate student or upper-level undergraduate in the humanities? Come join our team as a Makerspace technologist!

Our Makerspace is designed to foster experimentation with 3D printing, modeling, and digitization, physical computing (e.g. Arduino, wearables), virtual reality, and more. For humanists, it is a good way to learn more about experimental and digital humanities by exploring new uses for digital technologies in fields that do not traditionally integrate them. No prior experience with electronics or 3D printing is needed. Successful candidates will be trained on these tools and will in turn pass on their training to disciplinarily diverse students, faculty, and staff interested in using them for fun, teaching, and research. We also strongly encourage technologists to work on their own personal projects and to develop expertise based on their own scholarly interests.

An important aspect of Maker culture is apprenticeship and supporting makers in their pursuit of professional experience. We are looking for motivated individuals who are capable of working independently and value the opportunity to engage with and support a growing community. Benefits of the job may include: access to expertise and mentoring in your field of interest, opportunities for collaboration and publication, use of equipment and tools, and ability to shape Scholars’ Lab workshops and programming.

Candidates should be able to work up to 10 hours per week. Applications should consist of a cover letter discussing their interest in working in the Scholars’ Lab, any experience or interest in participating in a maker space, and any previous experience with public service or assisting others in using technology. Please send inquiries and applications to scholarslab@virginia.edu.

Multiple openings are available for Spring semester, and review of applicants is ongoing until filled.

In this post I’ll discuss my initial foray into natural language processing (NLP)—cleaning up a corpus and prepping it for some basic text analysis techniques. I want to begin, however, with a note on the small textual corpus that I’m using in these preliminary explorations—Black Magic, a 1969 collection of three books of poetry by Amiri Baraka.

In a prefatory note to the collection, Baraka offers an “Explanation of the Work” that touches on the three books of poetry contained within. “Sabotage,” he writes of the first book, “meant I had come to see the superstructure of filth Americans call their way of life, and wanted to see it fall. To sabotage it,” in a word. The second book, he argues, takes this intensity even further: “But Target Study is trying to really study, like bomber crews do the soon to be destroyed cities. Less passive now, less uselessly ‘literary.’” If these comments are any indication, the poetry of Black Magic has a certain level of emotional and political intensity. These poems articulate rage—they thunder, fulminate, and protest, venting a vindicated anger at racial injustice in America. Others simmer with a more restrained heat, but still tend to employ an often unsettling rhetorical violence. Consider, for example, the conclusion of a poem from Sabotage titled “A POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND”:

We have awaited the coming of a natural
phenomenon. Mystics and romantics, knowledgeable
workers
of the land.

But none has come.
(repeat)
but none has come.

Will the machinegunners please step forward?

Though startling, this final image punctuates a familiar narrative: the mounting of frustration, the boiling over of feeling while waiting and waiting for justice. The speaker’s closing remark seems to respond to the question asked in Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem”—”What happens to a dream deferred?”—but raises the ante of the inquiry, and shifts from Hughes’s suggestive but still open-ended conclusion (“Or does it explode?”) to an unsettling direct request (“Will the machinegunners please step forward?”). The poem also, however, seems aware of its high dramatic tone: it conveys the gravity of this deferred deliverance with somewhat formal rhetoric like “We have awaited” and “But none has come”, but highlights—and perhaps undercuts—its own theatricality by embedding a stage direction in the poem, “(repeat)”. We’ve waited for long enough, the poem seems to argue, but stages this claim in such a way that the final line’s delivery hangs suspended somewhere between deadpan and dead serious.

In short: a heightened revolutionary rhetoric permeates the poems in this collection. Many have noted, however, that a troubling violence permeates them as well. For example, one scholar describes “Black Art”—one of the most graphic but also most well-known poems from this collection—as “a difficult poem in its race and gender violence, in its violence against peoples.” In the 1991 The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, editor William J. Harris describes Black Magic as a collection in which Baraka “traces his painful exit from the white world and his entry into blackness,” an “exorcism of white consciousness and values [that] included a ten-year period of professed hatred of whites, and most especially jews [sic].” Baraka looks back at this period in his 1984 autobiography at a remove from the red-hot intensity of the poems themselves: “I guess, during this period, I got the reputation for being a snarling, white-hating madman. There was some truth to it, because I was struggling to be born, to break out from the shell I could instinctively sense surrounded my own dash for freedom.” From this perspective, this is the violence of escape, of “struggling to be born” from within a constricting “shell”—a version, perhaps, of the violence of the deferred dream that explodes at the end of Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem.”

Initial Steps with NLP

As a scholar interested in articulations of anger, resentment, and frustration with injustice—particularly injustice of a systemic and institutional nature—as well as digital methodologies, I thought these texts in particular might be worth looking at more closely with NLP techniques.

As a graduate student working in a period that is almost entirely still in copyright, however, Black Magic also interested me because it is a small corpus of works—three books of poetry—to which I currently have access through UVA. Though conceptually unglamorous, basic questions of access have played an enormous role in determining the initial paths in my scholarly decision-making process.

In this sense, though assembling workable data is always a challenge, scholars interested in literary texts prior to the early 20th century have more options for readily accessible textual corpora. For 20th- and 21st-century scholars interested in textual analysis, however, questions of copyright have made finding openly available textual data from which a corpus could be built an extremely difficult task: while able to share results of analyses through transformative, non-consumptive use, scholars of these periods cannot share the corpora from which these insights are drawn. This presents additional challenges in terms of reproducibility as well as in the already long, labor-intensive task of assembling, cleaning, and prepping a corpus prior to any actual application of NLP techniques. If texts aren’t already available as text files through a university or institution, they either have to be typed out by hand or scanned page by page, run through optical recognition software that transforms the page image into text, then also ultimately cleaned and corrected by hand. In short: no preexisting corpora means no experiments, prototypes, or conceptual ventures without surmounting certain barriers to entry that often prove time- or cost-prohibitive.

In the case of this project, even though UVA has access to the 1969 edition of Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967, the text isn’t ready for NLP out-of-the-box. The page contained a lot of text beyond that of the literary work in question: page numbers, line numbers, bibliographical information, headers and footers, all kinds of weird punctuation, and so on. For example, the title of the first poem in Sabotage, “Three Modes of History and Culture,” appeared in this electronic edition as follows:

To perform sentiment analysis on Sabotage, then, I first needed to get the raw text. By “raw text” I mean a big bag of all of Sabotage’s words. My goal initially was to get this bag of words with no line numbers, no punctuation, no capitalized first letters (otherwise Python would think they were two different words), and no spaces.

As someone doing this work for the first time, I felt like I could handle writing a program that would remove capital letters, get the txt file into the correct file-type, maybe even get rid of the line numbers. But what about all this clutter surrounding the title of each poem? I considered how I might remove this with a program, but even something as small as irregular line breaks means the words would be chopped up in slightly different ways each time. Given the size of the corpus, I decided it would be wiser to remove the clutter by hand than to write a one-time program that automated it.

With a huge assist from Brandon Walsh, cleaning up the rest of the text with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) was relatively straightforward. We wrote a small Python script that removed line numbers, then proceeded to write a script that would prep the clutter-free text files for text analysis, first by reading the text file as a list of lines (1), then by tokenizing that list of lines into a list of lists, where each sub-list is a list of the words that make up a line (2).

While this may seem kind of complicated, certain kinds of text analysis need the lines to be tokenized in this way—much of the work then involves getting the text to be the right kind of data type (list of words, list of lists, etc.) for a given kind of analysis. Because I’m interested in sentiment analysis, I also needed to make every word lowercase (3), remove punctuation (4), and remove spaces (5).

Having written out all these functions, we then made a new function that called on each of them one after the other, running through the pipeline of activities necessary for NLP (our notes-to-self included):

Though it gets the job done, this code is clunky. It represents, in short, the first steps in my learning how NLP works. And while not the most elegant in terms of form or function, writing steps out in this way was conceptually clear to me as someone trying them for the first time. I also want to add that throughout much of this Brandon and I were practicing something called pair programming, with Brandon at the keyboard (or “driving”) and me observing, asking questions, and discussing different ways of doing things. In addition to being an exciting scholarly investigation, this project is also a learning experience for me, and our code-decision-making process often reflects that.

But more on the intricacies of collaboration later. To recap, at this point I had a series of functions that, in a linear, step-by-step fashion, took my original text file and began to play with them in Python’s working memory: it took Amiri Baraka’s poetry as one data type (a giant string of words) and turned it into another (a tokenized list of lists), with some changes along the way (like lowercasing and getting rid of punctuation).

What made this so clunky, however, stemmed in large part from how I had organized my tasks: I gave Python basically only one thing to think about and work with at a time. It would take my corpus, W, and turn it into X, which it would then turn into Y, and then Z, and so on. But if I wanted Python to remember X while it was working on Z, I had to write code to turn Z back into X—in short, a data-type nightmare. Which sounds pretty abstract, but presented all kinds of practical problems.

For example, after having gotten all the way to Z—my lowercased, punctuation-free list of lists—I wanted to try a basic form of text analysis I had seen in an early chapter of the NLTK book (called stylistics) in which I compared the use of different modal verbs in the three books of Baraka’s poetry. The only way I knew how to do this was to run a frequency distribution on a giant list of words—which means I had to un-tokenize my nicely tokenized texts, basically jumping from Z back to W. So I wrote some clunky code that let me do so:

Grappling with this problem, Brandon re-introduced me to something I had learned about before but never had to use—object-oriented programming. Rather than performing a linear series of functions on my text file, reorganizing my code along OOP lines let me treat this text file as an object with many attributes, any of which I could access at any time. If I wanted my file (or object) as a giant list of words to perform a frequency distribution, I needed only to call upon that particular aspect (or attribute) of my object. If I then wanted Python to think of it as a tokenized list of lists I could just call on that particular attribute rather than having to send it through a series of transformations. It’s as if my ability to manipulate a file gained a third dimension— instead of begin stuck going from X to Y to Z and then back to X, I had access to all three stages of my file simultaneously. In essence, what was once a one-way data-type conveyor belt now became a fully-staffed NLP laboratory. In another pair programming session, we started to shift my more linear code to an object-oriented approach. What we came up with definitely needs refactoring (in my TODO list) and can certainly be improved (i.e., not overwriting a variable multiple times), but again, in the spirit of showing my learning process, I wanted to share a visual of this early version that marked my beginning to grapple with OOP for the first time:

Finally “getting” object-oriented programming conceptually was truly a programming awakening for me, even if my initial attempts need some improvement—it hadn’t really made sense as an approach until I was faced with the problems it helps address.

So we have the poems in all their fiery intensity, as well as the beginnings of actually using sentiment analysis as another way of thinking through them. As it currently stands, Brandon and I have started using TextBlob to perform some basic tasks—more on that soon. If you have any questions or want to follow along, my GitHub project repository can be found here.

]]>Kelli Shermeyerhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=140002017-11-30T15:31:07Z2017-11-30T15:31:07ZContinue reading ““All of the Questions:” A Recap of the 2017 Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Pre-Conference”.]]>In early October I was sent to represent the Scholars’ Lab at the Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference and the pre-conference meeting. This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of students, teachers, scholars, librarians, and instructional technologists for a weekend of conversation about many aspects of digital scholarship including pedagogy, community outreach/social justice, and institutional best practices. This year’s conference was called “Looking Forward, Looking Back: The Evolution of Digital Scholarship” and featured keynotes by Stephen Cartwright, Kalev H. Leetaru, and UVA’s on A.D. Carson.

Pre-conference plan:
How do we engage students in digital scholarship and support instructors as they incorporate DH or DS practices in their traditional classes? The BUDSC pre-conference was initially convened around these concerns and charged with the task of developing a “DS Cookbook” featuring ideas, best practices, and resources for instructors looking to include digital projects within their courses. We were initially asked to reflect on questions about our own experiences: What would have been helpful to know the first time we attempted to use digital scholarship in the classroom? How can we engage students in digital scholarship with limited budget, resources, or support?

What actually happened…
After a fortifying breakfast of coffee and donuts, our pre-conference group proceeded to make a list of all of the questions and concerns we were stewing over in our work as scholars, teachers, librarians, and instructional technology specialists. This white board was the result:

Some of these issues had to do with the intended purpose of the pre-conference – creating a guide for those interested in engaging students with digital scholarship (early concerns included: how do we scaffold or assess digital projects? What does it mean when administrators want students to have “digital literary” or “digital fluency?”) But it became immediately apparent that the interests of this group had a much wider scope.

Our morning session consisted of sorting all of the issues raised on this initial whiteboard into categories that we could work with more easily, as well as discussing and sharing resources that we all had at hand. In our afternoon session, we broke up into small groups to work on articulating major questions, a list of best practices, and a set of helpful resources for approaching these topics in a variety of contexts.

The results of our work were presented at the pre-conference recap session of BUDSC (which we re-titled “All of the Questions”) and will be published online forthcoming, but for now, here are some highlights:

Communicating with Stakeholders: This group provided strategies for talking with administrators and other stakeholders about the value of collaborative digital scholarship, how to find funding for cross-disciplinary work, and how to communicate about DH work as part of promotion and tenure. They suggested that A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities can be used as a helpful introduction to digital scholarship for administrators and faculty who are unsure of what they may be getting themselves into. MLA also has some guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship for P&T purposes.

Data Security & Privacy: This group explored a whole set of questions that I, frankly, had never thought about in any great depth. They asked us to consider, “What exactly is data, anyway? What do we consider to be data in the context of digital scholarship? As we delve more into the world of digital scholarship, it’s become evident that so much of what we do is based on some form of data – be that numerical data, textual data, geospatial data, audiovisual data, etc. With that in mind, how do you ensure ethical, responsible creation and maintenance/preservation of datasets?” The Data Curation Centre can supply researchers with expert help on this topic. This group also suggested Purdue’s Digital Retention Policy as a model document for schools or departments wishing to develop their own protocols regarding data.

Digital Pedagogy: Our group assembled a slew of resources for teachers wanting to engage with digital projects in their classrooms. We asked: “What are we assessing when we ask our students to complete digital assignments and how do their outcomes interface with the goals of traditional scholarship? How do we encourage them to value the process over the product?” The resource list includes many sample assignments and assessment ideas, as well as a collection of what we called “easy wins” – plug and play tools to work with in the classroom, including:Timeline js – make a simple, multimedia timelineVoyant – beginning large text analysisPrism – annotate your textTwine – create interactive fictionJuxta Commons – Compare textsIMJ – Large image visualization

IP/OA/Fair Use: This group explored how to approach fair use and copyright as our students use, remix, and edit online content for their own projects. We can begin by assessing our own/our institution’s tolerance for risk. Very important take-away point: No one is carting you off to jail for remixing something – the worst that will happen is a take-down notice. There’s also an increasing amount of legal precedence for going a little cowboy with fair use, as demonstrated by this video which not even Disney was able to successfully remove: A Fair(y) Use Talehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo.

Sustainability: The questions of project management, project charters, sunsetting, hosting, institutional repositories, and archiving looked like a separate category for us at first, but discussions of these issues were interwoven throughout the other four categories, rather naturally. Shout outs here went to Reclaim Hosting and Miriam Posner’s blog post on Project Charters.

N.B. quotations are from the co-authored pre-conference documents.

]]>Sarah McEleneyhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=139982017-11-30T18:52:10Z2017-11-30T15:15:22ZContinue reading “My Experience Leading a Workshop on Text Analysis at Washington and Lee University”.]]>[Sarah went to Washington and Lee University to give a workshop in Prof. Mackenzie Brooks’s DH 102: Data in the Humanities course through a Mellon-funded collaboration with WLUDH. More information about this initiative can be found here, and this piece is crossposted to the WLUDH blog.]

As a graduate student participating in the University of Virginia and Washington & Lee University digital humanities collaboration, during the fall 2017 I led a guest workshop on text analysis in Mackenzie Brooks’ course DH 102: Data in the Humanities. This workshop was an exploration of approaches to text analysis in the digital humanities, which concurrently introduced students to basic programming concepts. For humanities students and scholars, the question of how to begin to conduct text analysis can be tricky because platforms do exist that allow one to perform basic text analyses without any programming knowledge. However, the ability to write one’s own scripts for text analysis purposes allows for the fine-tuning and tailoring of one’s work in highly-individualized ways that goes beyond the capabilities of popular tools like Voyant. Additionally, the existence of a multitude of Python libraries allows for numerous approaches for understanding the subtleties of a given text of a corpus of them. As the possibilities and directions for text analysis that Python enables are countless, the goal of this workshop was to introduce students to basic programming concepts in Python through the completion of simple text analysis tasks.

At the start of workshop, we discussed how humanities scholars have used text analysis techniques to create some groundbreaking research, such as Matthew Jockers’ research into the language of bestselling novels, as well as the different ways that text analysis can be approached, briefly looking the online text analysis tool, Voyant.

For this workshop students downloaded Python3 and used the simple text editor that is automatically installed with it, IDLE. This way we didn’t have to spend time downloading multiple programs. While IDLE is rather barebones, its functionality as a text editor is fine for learning the basics of Python, especially if one doesn’t want to install other software. From here, by using a script provided to the students, we explored the concepts of variables, lists, functions, loops, and conditional statements, and their syntax in Python. Using these concepts, we were able to track the frequency of chosen words throughout different sections of a story read by the script.

The workshop then delved into a discussion of libraries and how work can be enhanced and made to better suit one’s needs by using specific Python libraries. As the focus of the workshop was on text analysis, the Python library that we looked at was NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit), which has a vast variety of functions that aid in natural language processing work, such as word_tokenize() and sent_tokenize(), which break up a text into individual parts, as words or sentences, respectively. The NLTK function FreqDist() simplifies the task of getting a count of all the individual words in a text, which we had done with Python alone in the prior script before working with NLTK. The inclusion of NLTK in the workshop was meant to briefly show students how important and useful libraries can be when working with Python.

While only so much can be covered over the course of a single workshop, the premise of the workshop was to show students that you can do some very interesting things with text analysis with basic Python knowledge, and to dive into Python programming headfirst while learning about general concepts fundamental to programming. As digital humanities methods for humanities research are becoming more and more common, working with Python’s capability for natural language processing is a useful tool for humanists, and in an introductory class, the goal of my workshop was to spark students’ interest and curiosity and provide a stepping stone for learning more, and at the end of the workshop, further resources for students to turn to in learning more about Python and text analysis were discussed.

]]>Christian Howardhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=139542017-11-21T19:35:21Z2017-11-21T19:35:21ZContinue reading “Learning to Augment Reality”.]]>The Praxis team is in the midst of defining its project, and for the past few weeks, we’ve been playing around with augmented reality (AR), specifically by using Vuforia and Unity. Learning about AR has been fascinating and, admittedly, a bit frustrating. I won’t go through the process of getting Vuforia and Unity to work with one another (here’s a great intro video if you’re interested!), but I will briefly discuss some of the challenges and implications of trying to augment reality.

First, the target image. The target image is the image that you augment, such that when you point your phone/camera at said image, the 3D figure that you have virtually “added” to the image appears on your screen. But the target image can be tricky. That is, Vuforia scans the target image for certain key features, by means of which the program can identify when your phone/camera is pointed at the target image. I’ve taken some screen shots of a few of the items that I augmented, which Vuforia ranks in terms of “augmentability.”

Images 1, 2, & 3: The Scholars’ Lab sign received an augmentable rating of one star, meaning its identifiable features are minimal. The cover of Vi Khi Nao’s book, Fish in Exile, has four stars, and the “cowboy” lunchbox residing in the Scholars’ Lab received an augmentable rating of five stars. The yellow crosses indicate the identifying features and patterns that Vuforia recognizes.

Not only does the target image need to have enough unique features to be easily identifiable, but the image should be properly edited so that nothing appears in the background. When the image is uploaded with a background, Vuforia will assume that the background is part of the target image, and it will identify features of the background as part of the patterns it is to look for. This will make it difficult if not impossible for your camera/device to recognize the image unless it appears with the exact same background.

Image 4: Cover of Fish in Exile against a mesh chair. The yellow crosses have primarily identified features of the chair – rather than the cover of the book – as unique features, and the “augmentability” of the image has declined to two stars.

Another problem that we ran into has to do with subject matter. We’re currently experimenting with items on or around UVA’s grounds. So we’ve been taking photos of items from the Small Special Collections, buildings, memorials, and even lunchboxes sitting around in office spaces. But this becomes problematic when the photos we take are affected by the environment. For instance, I tried taking a photo of the segment of the Berlin Wall that stands on UVA’s grounds, and here’s how it turned out:

Image 5: A photo of the Berlin Wall at UVA.

Encased in glass, the Berlin Wall is nearly effaced by the reflection of Small Library opposite it. Even, then, if I use a “clean” shot of the Berlin Wall taken from the Internet as my target image, my augmentation of the image will not be identifiable or reproducible if someone were to point their camera/phone at the actual Wall on grounds.

So needless to say, our work with AR is still very much in progress. But as we continue developing our AR ventures, considerations of target image complexity and environmental factors will, it seems, help shape the scope of our project.

And on this parting note, I’d like to include a couple fun pictures of the fruits of our augmentation experiments thus far. Enjoy!

Images 6-9: Augmentations of Fish in Exile and the Cowboy lunchbox.

]]>Ethan Reedhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=139242017-11-15T20:07:10Z2017-11-15T20:07:10ZContinue reading “Measured Unrest in the Poetry of the Black Arts Movement”.]]>As one of the graduate fellows at the Scholars’ Lab this year, I am working on a year-long digital project (that’s also a chapter of my dissertation) in collaboration with the folks at the SLab. To sum it up in a sentence, the project hopes to offer a proof-of-concept for performing sentiment analysis on some of the most politically and affectively charged poetry of the 20th century, that of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Today I wanted to post a brief overview and introduction to what I’m working on.

For some context, my research investigates theories of affect as they relate to race, class, and gender in American literature. I focus in particular upon the provocation and articulation of emotions like frustration, anger, and discontentment within recent US literary history as they relate to systemic injustice. An agitprop play that ends with shouts for workers to unite in class revolution; a poetic broadside that vents frustrations against white supremacy in America; a novel that indulges in a revenge fantasy against America’s colonial history. Unlike plays, poems, or novels that seem to obscure, submerge, or confound their own political dimensions, these works wear their hearts on their sleeves: they are frustrated, pissed off with how things are, and unafraid to speak truth to power in a direct, seemingly “un-literary” way.

At a certain level, then, this is a question of how, where, and to what ends aesthetics and politics meet in a work of literature. To offer a tidy narrative of this prickly history, this sensibility that mobilizes aesthetic objects to address political injustice has posed all kinds of unexpected, even contradictory problems for literary study. On the one hand, the cool detachment of aesthetic mediation keeps experimental works like John Dos Passos’s Communist-leaning U.S.A. trilogy from being seen as mere propaganda, but runs the risk of appearing elitist or self-indulgent. On the other hand, the red-hot political outrage of a protest poem by Amiri Baraka or Sonia Sanchez grounds itself in the present, but may be attacked for subordinating aesthetic sophistication to political agendas. “Anger is loaded with information and energy,” says Audre Lorde in a 1981 speech on its political uses—but the nature of this affective information, sparked by a given political present, becomes highly vexed when articulated by different groups through aesthetic objects.

Building on recent scholarship (like the work of Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai) suggesting that feeling gives structure to cultural formations, I argue that a history of unrest in America reveals a pattern of artistic response, a sensibility, precipitated by specific historical moments but translated into aesthetic practice through a stable constellation of affective structures. To this end, I examine continuities between politically-engaged aesthetic projects from three periods of discontent in American history: radical journals like Partisan Review in the 1930s; the revolutionary poetry of the Black Arts Movement in the 60s; and contemporary revenge-driven novels drawing from the Red Power movement.

My digital project as a graduate fellow is the second of those three chapters. In it I hope to ask two questions in particular: first, how are the feelings associated with injustice in the 1960s and 1970s coded in terms of race and gender? The Black Arts Movement first took shape at the height of the Black Power Movement with the foundation of the Revolutionary Theatre by Amiri Baraka in 1965. As Larry Neal—one of its principal theorists—says in a 1969 manifesto, the “Black Arts movement seeks to link, in a highly conscious manner, art and politics” toward “the liberation of Black people.” Moreover, the movement’s “black esthetic” is famous for its affective dimensions, often exploring the limits and political uses of anger, frustration, and poetic rage. But while BAM writers sought to link art and politics through explicitly racial terms, many—though by no means all—were marked by a failure to attend to the intersections of gender with racial injustice.

This leads to my second question: what can natural language processing techniques like sentiment analysis show us about the relations between different dimensions of poetry—like affect and gender—given that poetry, unlike movie reviews or customer feedback, is highly figurative and notoriously difficult to quantify in terms of sentiment or opinion? How can we combine the powerful scale of sentiment analysis with the granularity of close reading to explore the intersections of feeling, gender, race, and injustice in the radical poetry of this period? Moreover, by employing an interpretive method that is in part suspect from a revolutionary perspective—a distanced, potentially de-contextualized computational analysis—I wonder: what limits might these methods have in reading texts that are themselves shaped by the experience of an intense surveillance culture fearful of radical thought?

The already vibrant conversations on sentiment analysis and NLP more generally have been illuminating in forming my questions. The discussion between Matthew Jockers and Annie Swafford on the Syuzhet package and “archetypal plot shapes” has helped me not only to explore the current possibilities and limitations of sentiment analysis as applied to literary corpora, but also to think through the kinds of results we expect from digital projects and how we verify those results as an academic community. With regards to poetry and NLP more specifically, Lisa Rhody’s topic modeling of highly figurative ekphrastic poetry is a great model for how unexpected failures in textual analysis can also be productive, prompting us towards new questions as well as new understandings of familiar methods like close reading.

So far I have been working in collaboration with folks at the Scholars’ Lab to work through the NLTK handbook, building and prepping my corpus, and beginning to implement some NLP techniques with TextBlob on what I have so far. Another post on those first forays into NLP and sentiment analysis coming soon! In the meantime, if you have any questions about the project, texts or tools I should check out, or just find it interesting and want to talk about it, send me an email! I’ll be posting about my progress over the course of the coming months and aiming to keep my process as open as possible to new ideas, feedback, and inspiration from unexpected places.

]]>Ryan Maguirehttp://scholarslab.org/?p=139132017-11-14T17:38:41Z2017-11-14T17:35:03ZContinue reading “3D Printed Enclosures with OpenSCAD”.]]>This is a tutorial on how to use OpenSCAD to design a 3D object via code instead of using a WYSIWYG editor like Tinkercad, Fusion360, etc. We are currently creating a customized media player to allow people to interact with MP3 artifacts. We’ve been working in Python to prepare the audio and wanted to generate the enclosure programmatically as well, ideally using open source software. OpenSCAD is a great open source solution for CAD and 3D printing projects.

Modules

In OpenSCAD, you can quickly build duplicates of small parts into more complex designs using “modules”. By assigning variables to parameters, you can vary the size and location of these objects easily. Modules also help break a larger job into more manageable parts and keep the code nice and clean. The four modules below construct the main body of the enclosure, arrange the holes in the enclosure for our electronic components, add a texture to the enclosure, and assemble all the pieces together. After calling those four modules, all that is left to do is split the enclosure in two and render the halves as separate STL files for printing.

Main Enclosure Body

/* This module constructs the main body of the enclosure. First, we name the module: */
module enclosure() {
/* Next, we call the difference function. This specifies that we will be subtracting the second object we call from the first. We will use this to make our cube hollow. */
difference() {
/* The first object will be our main cube. to give the cube rounded edges, we call minkowski, which will trace the shape we specify around the edges. We will use a sphere, so that the hard edges of the cube will take on the shape of the sphere. */
minkowski()
{
/* Lastly, I am calling difference again here because I wanted to add a small indentation to the bottom of the cube so that it would be more comfortable to hold. Again, difference subtracts the second object from the first, so here, we see a cube; and then an offset (translated), smaller cube(); */
difference()
{
cube([60,40,15], center=true);
translate([-15,-10,-8])
cube([30,20,1.5]);
};
/* Having constructed the main box, we can now specify the size of the sphere that we will use to round the edges. */
sphere(2);
};
/* Having specified our main enclosure body with rounded edges and an indentation on the bottom, we finally hollow it out. */
cube([61.5,41.5,16], center=true);
}
}

Making Holes for Electronics Components

The second module creates all of the holes that we will place in the enclosure for our electronics components.

The next module creates a texture on the surface of our enclosure from an image file. We wanted to use an image of JPEG artifacts for our project, but you could use anything you’d like, or skip this step entirely. Be sure to keep your PNG files very simple here, otherwise you will run into problems when trying to render. When our PNG file was 31kb it took many hours to render and resulted in a huge STL file that was impossible to print. We needed to get our PNG down to 6kb to make it render in a reasonable amount of time. This resulted in a 5mb STL file. Still kind of big, but reasonable. Below, we call the translate() function so that it sits right on the surface of our enclosure.

module concat() {
/* Difference subtracts the second object from the first */
difference() {
/* Our first object is the Union of two objects. Here, union attaches the texture to the enclosure. */
union() {
texture();
enclosure();
};
/* the semicolon signals that that is a complete object. Now the second object is the one we made from the various holes. */
enclosureHoles();
}
}

Rendering and Printing

Now all we have to do is render using concat() and save as an STL!

/* To render the entire design, run: */
concat();
/* To actually print, we’ll need to render it in two separate halves which we will attach later. So, comment out the above concat() command and instead run the below code to render the top only */
difference() {
concat();
translate([0,0,-8.5])
cube([65,44,2], center=true);
}
/* then, comment the above out and run the following code to render the bottom only */
difference() {
concat();
translate([0,0,2])
cube([65,44,16], center=true);
}

That’s all there is to it! With the two halves rendered, all you have to do is save them as STL Files and then use your favorite 3D printing prep software to print.

If you’d like to learn more about OpenSCAD, here is a link to a great cheat sheet.

]]>Chris Gisthttp://scholarslab.org/?p=138892017-10-26T17:41:34Z2017-10-26T17:41:34ZContinue reading “GIS Day – Wednesday, November 15”.]]>Mark your calendars, Wednesday, Nov. 15 is GIS Day (http://www.gisday.com/). To celebrate, all are invited to the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab for an afternoon of events.

At 1PM, join us for a session on making the switch to ArcGIS Pro by our own Drew Macqueen. This is a quick and dirty overview of the major differences between ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro. Accept your fate as we delve into the future of desktop GIS. Spoiler alert, it’s totally worth it!

Lighting Talks

Starting at 2PM, our annual tradition of lightning talks continues. If you have never seen lightning round talks, they can be pretty entertaining: a rapid fire succession of speakers given a set, short amount of time and PowerPoint slides. In previous years, many great presenters have shown the incredible breadth of disciplines and fields in which GIS is used in meaningful ways.

We encourage everyone, including students (UVa, PVCC and high school), researchers and practitioners in the greater Charlottesville community to contribute. In this year’s round, each speaker will be given five to ten minutes (depending on number of presenters) with a maximum of ten slides. It is a fairly easy task to create and give a lighting round talk. Help make this year’s event special by participating in the talks. You can present on anything spatially related you like. It could be about a project you have worked on, things going on at your office or just something of personal interest.

If you have any interest in participating in the lightning round talks, please email us at uvagis@virginia.edu as soon as possible.

GIS Day Cake

Another great tradition continues. Please join us for the GIS Day cake unveiling and partake in the feeding frenzy.

]]>Ammon Shepherdhttp://mossiso.comhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=138542017-10-16T18:47:00Z2017-10-16T18:47:00ZContinue reading “ISAM 2017 – Libraries are for making”.]]>I recently participated in the International Symposium of Academic Makerspaces. I presented a paper, co-authored by Jennifer Grayburn (formerly a Makerspace Technologist, and now at Temple University’s Digital Scholarship Center). I present here the slides and talking notes of the 7 minute presentation, and a link to the full paper [Link to PDF].

Good morning, and thank you for coming. My name is Ammon Shepherd. My paper, co-authored by Jennifer Grayburn, looks at how libraries are uniquely suited to provide makerspaces for traditionally book-bound disciplines.

Jen Grayburn works at the Digital Scholarship Center, located in Paley Library at Temple University in Philadelphia.

I am located at the Scholars’ Lab in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. We both come from humanities backgrounds, so this paper is light on empirical research and heavy on anectodal evidence, but we are both working on tracking data and analyzing that with research questions in mind. To wit, our main question we sought to address with this paper is, How can we get more humanities researchers into our library makerspaces? In the paper we posit that libraries fulfill a unique roll at universities because they are typically departmentally agnostic. Libraries, in general, cater to all faculty, staff, students, and even members of the community.

With that in mind, Jen and I looked at both of our spaces (Yet Another Cross-space Comparison) and found four comparable attributes of how we attract and support research from humanities researchers. In this paper we look at four attributes:

accessibility,

contextualization,

collaboration,

outreach

Both our spaces seek to piggy back on the aforementioned phenomenon of Libraries as an academically neutral space. But adding technology normally only seen in the STEM fields proves to be a mental barrier to humanities researchers.

To address this, both spaces first sought to break down any physical barriers to entry. We are both located in open spaces in the main library on campus.

The Scholars’ Lab space is in a prime study and group-work area with great natural lighting. Physically open access is relatively easy to address, but mental barriers take more detailed planning. The remainder of the comparison points, and some take aways at the end, help to address the issue of breaking down mental barriers.

The major issue facing humanities research is the mental frustration with technology; usually the reason they give for picking the humanities in the first place. How then to ease that burden?

Both the DSC and SLab are staffed with individuals from very diverse backgrounds and skill levels. The DSC has full-time library staff, post-docs and graduate students from departments ranging from science, architectural history, and engineering to business.

The SLab has 3 full-time staff with library and history degrees, and graduate and undergraduate paid, part-time student employees from language, engineering and chemistry backgrounds.

This broad academic background encourages students from all fields to use our spaces. One anecdotal account comes from a bio-med student who felt more comfortable prototyping in our space because she didn’t feel an inferiority complex. She probably thought, they’re just historians, what do they know?

Encouraging collaboration enriches both staff and users, and both spaces encourage staff to work on personal research and collaborate with others.

The DSC partnered with the Ginsburg Library to offer free 3D printing for research, educational or clinical purposes. The 3D print of a pelvis from a CT scan is such a result. They also partnered with the Center for Advancement of Teaching to provide grants to faculty ranging from $500-$3500.

The SLab provides short term fellowships to humanities grad students for prototyping ideas. We have provided support for students to use 3D prints for presentations, and are helping a cardiovascular medical researcher print exercise equipment for mice. More examples are in the paper.

Collaboration with all departments expands the usefulness of the space beyond the physical location and engages the entire university, even humanities scholars.

Finally, outreach plays a major role in attracting any makers, especially interested humanities scholars.

The DSC provides workshops and training for all their equipment.

They also encourage staff and users to blog about successes and failures, and to publish results in journals.

The SLab holds workshops, has a prominent display case, and is a major stop on all the mandatory freshman library tours.

We also encourage users and staff to post their making on our blog. Publishing about the making, both successes and failures, encourages others to try; especially humanities researchers who may be afraid to fail.

I would like to conclude with four take aways that can help libraries make their makerspaces more approachable to humanities researches.

1st, have a passionate staff person in the makerspace. Skill level is less important, you can hire out or encourage student volunteers to bring in skill. But without excited library staff support, the space will flounder.

2nd, make the space physically accessible. Also think about how you can address mental and social barriers.

3rd, provide incentives to use the technology and space. Team up with Teaching and Learning centers. Provide free supplies and/or money.

Finally, use your library liaisons. They know your faculty and students, and they can proselytize the space. Bring them in for training on the equipment. Work with them on projects so they know what the space can provide and the tools can do.

]]>Spyridon Simotashttp://scholarslab.org/?p=138052017-09-24T01:12:59Z2017-09-21T15:02:18ZContinue reading “How to make books you haven’t read, talk.”.]]>As promised in my previous post, here is an idea for this year’s Praxis Program. It is uncertain at this early stage of brainstorming whether it will be retained as the one uniting everybody’s creative forces and ingenuity, but I believe it has a lot of potential of unfolding into a project where everybody’s common interests meet: library’s holdings, global culture and world languages, power and inequality, literature and sound. At its core, it is as humanistic as it can be, and its execution requires the use of common digital humanities and critical making techniques, that we are here to train for. But before I get to the idea, let me take you to a journey where books are no longer written, nor pressed into rectangular objets made out of ink and paper and they are by no means meant to be read.

The end of books

More than a hundred years ago, at the turn of the 19th century, Octave Uzanne, a French bibliophile and journalist, conceived The End of Books1 (audio file) in one of his most cited short nonfictional works. His prediction, mid way between pure speculation and prophecy was that the new media of his time, the rise of electricity and phonography, would soon replace the old Gutenberg’s invention.

“I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products.”

“our grand-children will no longer trust their works to this somewhat antiquated process, now become very easy to replace by phonography”.

The leap was enormous. Uzanne’s reverie, not only depicted books as a dying medium with no future, but shifted their inherent mutism to the vivacity of the audio recording. It is important to notice, and Uzanne himself insists on the matter, that books don’t have to put a strain on our eyes and bodies anymore, keeping us immobile, squint and hunched over the small print of the page.

“You will surely agree with me that reading, as we practice it today, soon brings on great weariness; for not only does it require of the brain a sustained attention which consumes a large proportion of the cerebral phosphates, but it also forces our bodies into various fatiguing attitudes.”

“Our eyes (…) have been too long abused, and I like to fancy that some one will soon discover the need there is that they should be relieved by laying a greater burden upon our ears.”

What is in the book that can not live in another recorded medium? Ideas, scientific knowledge and scholarship, literary work, can all exist in an audible format. For Uzanne, phonography not only can afford the contents of the book, but this change of reception through another sensory organ, the ear instead of the eye, has clear benefits for the overall mental and physical health of the listener.

“Hearers will not regret the time when they were readers; with eyes unwearied, with countenances refreshed, their air of careless freedom will witness to the benefits of the contemplative life.”

“At home, walking, sightseeing, these fortunate hearers will experience the ineffable delight of reconciling hygiene with instruction; of nourishing their minds while exercising their muscles for there will be pocket phono-operagraphs, for use during excursions among Alpine mountains or in the canyons of the Colorado.”

It is obvious that Uzanne not only imagined the audiobook but also a prototype portable device that would play it back.

It is worth noticing then, that before Sony’s Walkman, or Apple’s iPod “a pocket apparatus (…) suspended by a strap from the shoulder” was not designed to accommodate “a thousand songs in your pocket” (Steve Jobs) but a portable device to liberate the bibliophile’s body from the immobility of the study room.

Uzanne’s intuitions, albeit prophetic for the most part, failed to envision a future where both printed and audiobooks exist without posing a threat to each other. New technologies first thought as replacement to the old ones end up coexist offering alternative options of engagement. Audiobooks didn’t replace print books and certainly listening didn’t replace reading.

The impossible task of reading

However, reading, despite being an unhealthy activity as we just saw, heavily taxing one’s eyes and body, forcing its muscles to atrophy, is an overall impossible task. Too much to read, too little time.

“When Brandon was entering graduate school, an older student once summed up one of life’s problems as a sort of equation:

There is an infinite of material that one could read.

There is a finite amount of time that you can spend reading.

The lesson was that there are limits to the amount of material that even the most voracious reader can take in. One’s eyes can only move so quickly, one’s mind only process so much. This might sound depressing, as if you’re playing a losing game. But it can also be freeing: if you cannot read everything, why feel the need to try to do so? Instead, read what you can with care.” 2

The sentiment is not new. Today’s readers may feel completely crushed under the weight and the abundance of reading material, but so did the erudite from the early modern era. Compiling methods (common place books, anthologies, florilegia) were thus put in place to compress books within books and save the reader from the folly of having to read everything in extenso.

Pierre Bayard in his first chapter of his now classic How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read3 addresses the issue by suggesting a few methods of non-reading.

“Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.” 4

The paradoxical nature of reading as non-reading, leads Bayard to an important insight: the contents of the book don’t really matter. They can be interchangeable even.5 After all, one’s memory of the books read, will inevitably boil its intricate details to a mush.

“ The interior of the book is less important than its exterior, or, if you prefer, the interior of the book is its exterior, since what counts in a book is the books alongside it.” 6

Don’t lose the forest for the trees is what Bayard basically saying. A library is a whole ecosystem that invites the “truly cultured to tend toward exhaustiveness rather than the accumulation of isolated bits of knowledge.” 7 There is a whole network of connections between one book and the totality of books which is undermined when the attention is only given to each book’s singularities.

“It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books.” 8

This “topographical approach” that values location over content, or content as location, and the nature of connections that one book enjoys with others is what Bayard calls collective library. Books are in dialogue with each other and the way to get even a faint echo of their conversations is movement. Moving around the library is preferable to the stasis over one particular location-book. The invention of hypertext as “an ongoing system of interconnecting documents” (Ted Nelson) was an attempt to establish the dynamic of movement to what had long seen as a static material. Only, one, still has to read…

The problem with languages.

Books are not only innumerable, there are also written in different languages, which is another reason inhibiting from reading them (all).

Before I move on, I would like to share with you a 1m07” clip from a recent episode of Twin Peaks The Return. In this scene special FBI Agent Gordon Cole, (played by David Lynch himself) after sending off his date (a French woman) to the bar, turns to his colleague Albert with a joke…

Lynch leaves the question linger in silence. It is a way to acknowledge the alarm that just went off: over six thousands languages!9 Despite their exact number, languages exist, people who speak them exist, and their world views and perspectives are as worthwhile as any. Languages are not a property of any particular population living on a specific location, they spill over borders, they travel like wild fire. But they are also used as means of oppression, when powerful cultural systems impose their monolingualism and consequently their world view to others. What does that make of the idea of the collective library? Who’s part of the collective and who’s not? How far can this collective be stretched to be a really inclusive collective and not just a club for the happy few?

It seems to me that World Languages are the blind spot in the discussions about global culture and diversity, about inequalities and web accessibility. Who gets the joke when it’s a word play intended to the speakers of the same language? Indeed, nobody laughs.

Listen, with all your ears, listen!

After this rather long detour, I am finally arriving to my proposal. I think it is time to consider Uzanne’s sensorial shift from the eye to the ear and pair it with Bayard’s dialogical relations of books in the collective library. Technically speaking this coupling would take the form of an exploratory device (or app). Its user would then be able to explore the stacks, through a bibliophilic auditory flânerie. Following a fortuitous trajectory inside the library10, the user will not only experience the books coming to life, but also the vast range of world languages in which these books are written11. As the user moves from one section of world literature to another, preinstalled sensors would capture her movement and send new content to her device, interfering with, or completely altering her soundscape. But, it is preferable not to discuss such technical details extensively, without a working prototype at hand.

Finally, the purpose of such a device, as mentioned before, is to offer a new experience of exploring the library other than having to look for a specific book, related to a specific topic often suggested by some course syllabus. I want to believe that a university library has much more to offer than a business-like exchange model. Despite not having an immediate benefit for the user, such a serendipitous bibliophilic auditory flânerie through a vast range of world languages may function as catalyst for awakening the desire to learn a new language.12 And when the user decides to stop her flânerie she will receive a prompt asking her if she wants to borrow a book, most likely one of which she has never heard before.

A more comprehensive view on the languages spoken today in the world is offered by Ethnologue: « How many languages are there in the world? », Ethnologue, 3 mai 2016, https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages.

The extent of fortuity can also be configured with a set of questions, allowing the user to add her parameters to the game.

For prototyping purposes public domain librivox recordings will be used.

I happen to fall in love with French from something I heard on the radio.

]]>Monica Blairhttp://scholarslab.org/?p=137672017-09-19T15:28:11Z2017-09-19T15:28:11ZContinue reading “Crafting Our Charter – Praxis Program 2017-2018”.]]>As a historian, when I think of charters, the first things I think of are royal charters.

The first result when you Google charter, on the other hand, is Charter Telecommunications Company because of course.

But as members of the new Praxis Fellowship cohort, my fellow fellows and I tried to chart (I’m sorry) a very different path. The result of our work, The Praxis Charter, 2017-2018, is the first thing we ever created together.

Transparency is one of our core values, so I am going to use this post to reveal the process by which we made this document.

Our charter’s first draft was written in a jam session in a Scholars’ Lab meeting room, and the fact that we are all teachers was readily evident. We privately brainstormed, we paired and shared those ideas, and then we had a class discussion with Christian at the technological helm. I often think of grad school as a lesson in liminality.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

That was on full display as we drew on the techniques we use to facilitate classroom discussions to jumpstart our own collaborative work. The liminality of grad school isn’t always to its credit, but in this case, the results were lovely. As a teacher and a historian of education, I spend a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. The pedagogy modeled here made my heart happy! We melded the skill sets of both teachers and students pretty seamlessly to create a productive partnership.

Our conversation always seemed to come back to values. Values are, I think, the core of this document. Of course, for every positive value, there is an equal and opposite disvalue. The opposite of humility is egotism. The opposite of flexibility is rigidity. The opposite of transparency is obfuscation. I think this connects to a comment my fellow Torie made, that writing this charter was almost cathartic, because we could list every problem we had encountered with group work and essentially say: not that.

This, of course, points to the idea of conflict. As our joyful leader Brandon Walsh noted, past Praxis cohorts have tended to avoid naming conflict in their charters in the hopes that their silence would prevent it from ever rearing its ugly head. Think of conflict as the he-who-must-not-be-named of group work, if you will.

Ignoring conflict didn’t really work out for the Ministry of Magic though, and I doubt that the academy fairs much better. My hope is that by setting out clear goals, values, and strategies for coping with conflict we will enable our future selves to handle disagreements with aplomb and grow from them, rather than shrink from them.

Perhaps the most radical value embodied in our charter is our commitment to “the creation of a participatory democracy.” Participatory democracy is an idea coined by one of my favorite historical figures, civil rights and feminist icon Ella Baker. Participatory Democracy embraces two ideas, “a decentralization of authoritative decision-making and a direct involvement of amateurs or non-elites in the political decision-making process.” Participatory democracy seems like the perfect fit for the Praxis Program as we are all relative amateurs in the digital humanities, and we have been given the task of working and learning together. It also just seems to fit our collective personality. When we talked about past Praxis strategies, we decided we didn’t want to divide and conquer the tasks ahead like many previous years had. We wanted to work on individual elements of our project together so that we could get the most out of our training. This would also allow us to commit to a truly shared vision.

In so many ways, a charter is a reminder of our deeply held values. We all carry around ideals of honesty and creativity, kindness and diversity, but writing out a charter makes you actually reflect on those values and why you hold them dear. Writing a charter allows you to reflect on what it is you like about collaborative work – and what it is you don’t, and then make a promise to yourself and to others to try and embody the best of what collaboration has to offer.

As for our radical experiment in participatory democracy, I can already hear people asking, is that practical? The true answer is: I don’t know. But Praxis seemed like just the place to try it out.

Zoe rose to the top of an extremely strong pool of over 60 applicants. A History ABD at Vanderbilt University, she focuses on post-colonialist movements and media in Cairo and other capitals. She brings solid technical experience in the areas of front-end web design, text and image analysis, and mapping and data visualization, with skills including React, Redux, Elixir, and Postgres, and fluency in French and Arabic.

Her particular expertise and passion for making technically difficult DH methods accessible and enjoyable to all complements the SLab’s emphasis on pedagogy and mentorship. She balances the SLab’s literature scholars and complements our history scholars, both diversifying our areas of work to the Middle East and adding new expertise in archival research in countries with different archival practices and challenges from the U.S.

Hello again, my fine digital-humanist friends! It’s a delight to be back in the Scholars’ Lab this year!

For those who don’t know me, my name is Christian Howard, and I am a PhD Candidate at UVA in English literature and one of the 2017-2018 Praxis Fellows. If you do happen to know me, you might also know that I was fortunate to work in the Makerspace of the Scholars’ Lab last year. In any case, I’m excited to combine the knowledge that I gained there working on hands-on, material projects with finer computer skills and the even greater conceptualizations into which I expect our Praxis team will delve.

I’ve recently been rereading Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, and I want to reflect briefly on one of Drucker’s points, which I think is especially central to our Praxis team this year. Drucker brilliantly exposes “data” as constructs, constructs that cannot “pre-exist their parameterization.” As such, Drucker opts for the alternative term, “capta,” stating: “Data are capta, taken not given, constructed as an interpretation of the phenomenal world, not inherent in it” (128). Capta comes from the Latin verb capio, capere, which, translated literally, means “to capture, take, seize.” Yet in a more figurative sense, capere could also mean “to take in, understand.” It is partly because of this pun that I find Drucker’s redefinition particularly apt, for it is precisely the act of “capturing” information that facilitates our understanding of that information. In other words, every decision to define the parameters under which “data” will be taken is itself an interpretive strategy.

So what does this mean for humanists, and digital humanists in particular? I’ll quote Drucker again, this time at length:

“To expose the constructedness of data as capta a number of systematic changes have to be applied to the creation of graphical displays. That is the foundation and purpose of a humanistic approach to the qualitative display of graphical information. That last formulation should be read carefully, humanistic approach means that the premises are rooted in the recognition of the interpretive nature of knowledge, that this display itself is conceived to embody qualitative expressions, and that the information is understood as graphically constituted” (128-129).

It is this recognition – namely, in the fundamentally interpretive nature of data-as-capta – that distinguishes the humanities as a discipline.

As a Praxis cohort, we are still working to define the shape that our project will take; nonetheless, in developing our charter or mission statement, we have unanimously agreed that transparency is of the utmost importance to us. As such, we are committed not only to sharing the result of our collaboration with the public, but also to showing the processes through which our project develops, thereby enabling anyone to trace the interpretations and assumptions underlying our own work.

Well, that’s all the heavy-lifting for today. For those of you who found this introductory post too lengthy, I’ve provided a handy summary for you below:

TL;DR: Born at a young age, I have pursued my education in order to justify my caffeine-dependency. Most recent greatest achievement? I’ve just beaten my all-time personal record of most consecutive days lived! Time to celebrate with some coffee and chocolate.

]]>Spyridon Simotashttp://scholarslab.org/?p=137442017-09-11T01:24:42Z2017-09-11T01:24:42ZContinue reading “About my research, computers and Digital Humanities”.]]>In my inaugural post a few days ago, I introduced myself to the world in kind of an oblique way. Some people may wonder what I am studying or what my research interests are. This post is here to mend this omission. In large brush strokes, I will talk about my dissertation and then about some general research interests that connect me to digital humanities. Coincidentally, a brief mention of a computer prototype from the late 60’s will echo for the Praxis folks our last meeting (Sept. 5, 2017) and the lesson on the history of computers.

My current project focuses on three French contemporary authors who are using new technologies to create and disseminate their work, as well as connect with their audience. More specifically, I am looking at the ways in which new technologies expand the boundaries of literature to include practices often reserved to other artistic disciplines. I am also interested in the new online literary communities clustering around the websites of my corpus and in the margins of the print and prize-driven French literature.

Having escaped the pages of the book, literature meets with visual arts, with sound and performance, in new poetic hybrids. The book is always a place where textual content can return to, but it is not the only option. Moreover, various acts of transcoding, made possible through digital technologies, have liberated writing from its exclusive attachment to text. Our contemporary “associated technical milieu” has made the creative gesture a practice available to anyone with a computer connected to the Internet.

“Rather than dissociating consumption from production, as did broadcast mass media (from phonography to global real-time television), today’s microtechnologies and the social networking practices they facilitate connect them: if you can use these technologies to consume, you can also use them to produce.”1

Interestingly enough, the gap between amateurs and professionals is narrowing , which revives Jean Dubuffet’s concept of “art brut” (i.e. art made by people without formal training). Under these circumstances where everything is created by everybody, how does a contemporary author find her place? How does she define her space and the value of her work?

Kenneth Goldsmith dubbed these practices “uncreative writing” and traced their origin to some French avant-garde techniques such as those invented by the Situationists (détournement, psychogeographical drifts) and Oulipo.

“Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’ was founded fifty years ago, in 1960, by the writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais with the purpose of exploring the possible uses of mathematics and formal modes of thought in the production of new literature. Oulipo sought to invent new kinds of rules for literary composition, and also to explore the use of now-forgotten forms in the literatures of the past. ”2

Georges Perec, one of the most popular authors among the Oulipo group (the star!), has experimented with algorithmic writing, imitating the inner workings of a computer program, in The art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise,3or with extreme self-imposing lipogrammatic constraints in A Void4 (exclusively composed of words that don’t contain the letter “e”), has also written a a very brief enthusiastic text about computers. Published at a time where computers were still the size of a room, Perec anticipated their everyday personal and social use. “Why not us?” he asks, claiming a programmable machine for creative purposes at home, a place already targeted by a horde of appliances: washing machines and toasters, coffee makers and vacuum cleaners, TV sets and food processors.

A dynamic medium for creative thought: the Dynabook

Around the same time, at the Palo Alto Xerox PARC Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg were working on a prototype computer strikingly similar to a today’s tablet. They called it Dynabook (portmanteau for dynamic book) and they imagined it as

“a self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations and anything else you would like to remember and change.” 5

Dynabook, unlike any other computer of its generation, was not targeting the military or corporate business. It was designed “for kids of all ages”, people who would use it to enhance their learning and creativity. I want to emphasize the last words here: “to remember and change”. If the computer was to become personal, it was not only because of its capacity to store information, archiving one’s files, and consequently exteriorizing and extending one’s memory but also by offering new techniques to process the information stored and eventually to create new. Technology has always been about extending human capabilities.

“The human evolves by exteriorizing itself in tools, artifacts, language, and technical memory banks. Technology on this account is not something external and contingent, but rather an essential—indeed, the essential—dimension of the human.” 6

As a matter of fact, the idea of a mechanical memory storage was not new. Vannevar Bush in his well-known article “As we may think” published in 1945 had already introduced a mechanical memory (memex) for individual use 7. Beyond the scope of the Universal Turing Machine –a machine that could simulate other machines– Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s ambition was to create a Universal Media Machine, a machine that could simulate all other media forms, from books to images to films.

“For educators, the Dynabook could be a new world limited only by their imagination and ingenuity. They could use it to show complex historical inter-relationships in ways not possible with static linear books. Mathematics could become a living language in which children could cause exciting things to happen. Laboratory experiments and simulations too expensive or difficult to prepare could easily be demonstrated. The production of stylish prose and poetry could be greatly aided by being able to easily edit and file one’s own compositions.” 8

But in order to achieve this goal of becoming a ”platform for all existing expressive artistic media”, Dynabook had to exceed its function as a storing machine, by adding a new structural level on top of the hardware allowing an easy interaction with the machine. Hence, GUI was born with tools and icons that could help the user perform the same actions across applications, without needing to know the underlying programmatic commands.

“Putting all mediums within a single computer environment does not necessarily erase all differences in what various mediums can represent and how they are perceived—but it does bring them closer to each other in a number of ways. Some of these new connections were already apparent to Kay and his colleagues; others became visible only decades later when the new logic of media set in place at PARC unfolded more fully; some may still not be visible to us today because they have not been given practical realization. One obvious example of such connections is the emergence of multimedia as a standard form of communication: web pages, PowerPoint presentations, multimedia artwork, mobile multimedia messages, media blogs, and other communication forms which combine multiple mediums. Another is the adoption of common interface conventions and tools which we use in working with different types of media regardless of their origin: for instance, a virtual camera, a magnifying lens, and of course the omnipresent copy, cut and paste commands. Yet another is the ability to map one media into another using appropriate software—images into sound, sound into images, quantitative data into a 3D shape or sound, etc.—used widely today in such areas as DJ/VJ/live cinema performances and information visualization. All in all, it is as though different media are actively trying to reach towards each other, exchanging properties and letting each other borrow their unique features. ” 9

The success of the personal computer was therefore due to its structural coupling with software that led –so far– to three major shifts in the way we interact with media. Word processors to movie editors, allowed the user to mix, juxtapose, cut and paste, alter, and eventually produce new media. Using the same machine to perform changes in the stored contents was an empowering new form of grammatization.

Return to kindergarten

I borrow the concept of grammatization from Bernard Stiegler. Derrida’s former student, Stiegler calls grammatization every flow that becomes a process through a series of discrete marks, grammés, that can form a code (grammar) and can be endlessly reproduced in all sorts of combinations. Writing, for example, is the grammatization of speech and it is made possible by the invention of the letters (grammata ) of the alphabet. Alphanumeric linear writing, up until personal computers came along, was the dominant form of recording, from facts (history) to thoughts and ideas (literature). So much so that the activities of learning to read and write were the main literacy focus of a certain humanistic tradition, from grade school to the academy.

In his seminal book Does Writing Have A Future?, Vilém Flusser speculates on the disruption of this tradition brought forth by the computers and their new ways of writing through digital recording and digitization. Without discarding the value of the alphanumeric writing he embraces the possibility of new forms of writing that could lead to a progressive replacement of “the alphabet or Arabic numerals”.

What was once written can now be conveyed more effectively on tapes, records, films, videotapes, videodisks, or computer disks, and a great deal that could not be written until now can be noted down in these new codes. … Many people deny this … They have already learned to write, and they are too old to learn the new codes. We surround this … with an aura of grandeur and nobility.

Flusser foresees with a great clarity what is yet to come when he publishes his book in 1987. What may seem as a radical stance, results from his position not to resist or reject the new technologies, but to discover their creative and pedagogical potential altering and adding new avenues to the the millennia old practices of reading and writing. But the newness of these tools, their sometimes complex inner workings call for a return to kindergarten.

We have to go back to kindergarten. We have to get back to the level of those who have not yet learned to read and write. In this kindergarten, we will have to play infantile games with computers, plotters, and similar gadgets. We must use complex and refined apparatuses, the fruit of a thousand years of intellectual development, for childish purposes. It is a degradation to which we must submit. Young children who share the nursery with us will surpass us in the ease with which they handle the dumb and refined stuff. We try to conceal this reversal of the generation hierarchy terminological gymnastics. While we’re about this boorish non-sense, we don’t call ourselves Luddite idiots but rather progressive computer artists. 10

Isn’t it the “digital turn” that Flusser anticipated with his “infantile games with computers”? And isn’t it Flusser’s kindergarten spirit that lives in labs and DH centers across the academy? Similarly, most recent “making turn” also happens in the same centers and labs.

”As the historian David Staley explains, the “maker turn” introduces “an approach to the humanities that moves our performances off the page and the screen and onto the material world, a hermeneutic performance whereby humanists create non-textual physical objects.” 11

Inspired by Patrick Jagoda’s recent article on “Critique and Critical Making”, this year’s Praxis cohort is set to explore the intersection of DH and the bricolage of physical computing. Taking the cue from Pierre Bayard’s How to talk about books you haven’t read12 , we have been wondering “how to make books you haven’t read talk!” But more about it in the next post. Stay tuned!

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

]]>Spyridon Simotashttp://scholarslab.org/?p=137272017-09-09T23:30:45Z2017-09-06T16:47:33ZContinue reading “Hello World!”.]]>My name is Spyros Simotas and I am a PhD candidate at the French Department at UVa. This year, I am also a Praxis fellow at the Scholars’ Lab. In this first blog post I would like to briefly introduce myself honoring Brandon’s ice-breakers.

Brandon always comes to our meetings with an ice-breaker. Here are the three we have had so far:

Which is your favorite animal?

Which is your favorite plant?

Who would you like to have dinner with, dead or alive?

My favorite animals are elephants, my favorite plants are palm trees and if I could have a meal with anyone dead or alive, I would like to have coffee with David Lynch.

I like elephants because they are big, they make the sound of a trumpet and they care about each other. Despite their size, elephants do not pose a threat to other beings. They are also smart and they can paint. Has anyone ever calculated the size ratio between an elephant and an average-sized bug? Bugs are the most common wild life form we are stuck with in the industrialized and post-industrialized world. Domesticated farm animals that we use for food or pets don’t count. We are stuck with bugs both literally and metaphorically. Unfortunately, I have never seen an elephant hanging from the wall, or lurking inside a piece of software.

I have seen palm trees! The reason I like them is because of their simple shape. Their trunk doesn’t branch out, it only ends with a crown of leaves, like a messy toupee. Palm trees are easy to draw. When I lived in California, I remember that sometimes, their tops would disappear in the early morning mist. Also, three cut out palm trees figure on the cover of The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry as a fine representation of their iconic hair style. Which brings me to David Lynch and his own impeccably messy hairdo.

Having begun his career with Eraserhead, it is hard to tell whose, his character’s or his own hair, is the source of inspiration for this electrified spiky hair style. Since then, he has created a lot of strange and heartbreaking characters. Joseph Merrick’s story, better known as The Elephant Man, The Staight Story, not to mention all the characters from his early 90’s TV series Twin Peaks revived recently, 25 years later, for a third and final season. Thanks to his book on meditation, consciousness and creativity, I was also introduced to TM. It is a small book, called Catching the big fish, very easy to read and highly recommended.

As an ending to this post, I chose the following excerpt from the chapter “The Circle” where Lynch refers to the feedback loop between an art work and its audience.

“I like the saying: “The world is as you are.” And I think films are as you are. That’s why, although the frames of a film are always the same—the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds—every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it’s there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. … So you don’t know how it’s going to hit people. But if you thought about how it’s going to hit people, or if it’s going to hurt someone, or if it’s going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films.”1

I think the same can be said about digital humanities. Our public scholarship, experiments, code, teaching, and service, also reflect who we are and reverberate with our audience. In our first Praxis meeting, we talked about impact, trying to pinpoint the idea of success. But ultimately, we don’t know “how it’s going to hit people.” In which case, it is always useful to remember the well-known Marshall McLuhan scheme of technology as an extension of certain urges or desires. It is important to understand what is the urge that we are trying to extend because technology, according to Jonathan Harris (who also came up in our first discussion), can have “dramatic effects” on people. That’s why, he calls for “a self-regulated ethics that comes from the mind and the heart of the creator.” Finding our own common interests and desires as a team will help us define the direction we want our project to go. At this early stage, we only know that we want to work with data from the Library, using technology to create new interactions with the archive. But it is with the principles of love, care and good intentions that we embark on this year’s Praxis adventure.